Empty rhetoric over Syria masks colonial machinations built upon bloodshed and starvation

There is nothing worse than seeing a child dying of hunger, but today it is almost normal. The international colonial media and its disgraceful Arab counterpart have no shame when it comes to the tragedy of a nation dying of hunger. Modern civilisation has reached yet another level of savagery, to the extent that death no longer stirs anyone as long as it is far away and witnessed on a television screen.

The Syrian tragedy evolves daily, reaching the point of an open humanitarian crisis marked by two characteristics: the tragedy is known to everyone and its images are shown every day on the televisions and social networking sites; despite this clarity and its ugliness, the tragedy is also being met by international, Arab and Muslim silence. There is a near complete failure to take action and put an end to the massacres demonstrating globalised brutality, the death of values and the collapse of all morality as propounded by the modern world through its cultural, literary and artistic outlets.

What is more dangerous than the starving to death of children in Yarmouk Refugee Camp, or besieged rural Madaya near Damascus, at the hands of the regime army and Lebanon’s Hezbollah is the absence of a firm Arab or international position to stop the blood bath that is drowning Syria. This is despite the fact that the violence breaks all international norms, conventions and laws which we see being cited and upheld whenever illegal incidents align with colonial interests.

Starvation is one of the most barbaric weapons in modern history; all invading armies, it seems, have used it to take revenge on those civilians who were not hit by their missiles and bombs. In Syria’s case, people are starving as a result of a complex interaction of many revenge elements plus those associated with climate or industrialisation as seen in places like China, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan. One direct consequence of the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Syria is that there are serious tremors in the collective Arab consciousness, which is already unsettled as a result of the Arab Spring.

The people of Syria have experienced much over the past five years since the start of the peaceful protests against the government. Death and destruction have rained down on them in the form of barrel bombs, chemical weapons, cluster bombs and the all-too-familiar list of internationally-available weapons. The scale of the destruction is evidence of how the regime of Bashar Al-Assad reacted to peaceful protests, transforming the revolution calling for freedom into a brutal civil war in which the ruling sectarian minority is killing an entire nation with the help of foreign mercenaries.

The international community is complicit in these crimes by its near-silence and lack of action in the face of the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed against men, women and children by criminals whose identity is known to the world. Tomorrow, who will be able to say, “We did not know what was happening”, as was claimed when people woke up to the horror of Nazi crimes? The crimes are on prime-time television but nobody is doing anything to stop the criminals. Relatively small crimes take place in Europe and world leaders gather in a public show of condemnation, but they turn their backs on Syria. Indeed, some of them help the criminals.

The lesson we must learn from what is happening in Syria is that international rhetoric about peace and justice is meaningless; the powers that be are merely managing the brutality with statements and fruitless meetings.

It has become very clear that the Arab body that was moved by the first revolutionary waves in the Arab Spring has grown exhausted by the counter-revolution and the daggers of the deep state embedded across the region. The approach has shifted from achieving freedom and justice to dealing with chaos and burying the dead.

No one can deny that the international colonial forces are using their proxies in the Middle East to transform the revolutions and public desire for change and progress into vehicles for destruction and devastation in order to present the oppressive dictatorships as the only acceptable model of government in the Arab world. “Either you accept the collusion and tyrannical regimes,” the West appears to be telling the Arab masses, “or you accept death by explosive barrels, chemical weapons and starvation.”

Such hostile behaviour towards the Arab nations aspiring for freedom has to be held responsible to a large degree for moves towards extremism and terrorism. This is then used as a pretext for more colonial intervention on one hand and more legitimacy for the dictators on the other.

The Arab Spring has provided some painful lessons. Commodities such as “international legitimacy”, “human and animal rights”, “the protection of minorities” and even democracy itself are empty slogans masking colonial machinations built upon bloodshed in the Arab world and the empty stomachs of Syrian children.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.